Voices in the Wire
by Calaeris
Summary: A dystopian London, ruined and broken, but not ground down, not quite yet.  A km prompt that went out of control.
1. Voice in the Wire

AN:/ I wrote this for a prompt on the kinkmeme (which is more embarrassing to write than I thought it would be) and it seemed to garner a positive reaction, so I decided to share it here as well.

The prompt was:

"BBC news at midnight," said the voice from the radio. "This is Sherlock Holmes."  
><em>Maybe it's a newsreader AU, or maybe it's something darker where Sherlock is in charge and has taken over the airwaves...<em>

Voice in the Wire

The world has gone to hell.

There's no police left on the streets, now – there's nobody left to pay them. The government and the Royal Family went into seclusion three months ago along with all their 'experts' and their families. Everybody suspects but nobody will say that they've gone into hiding and abandoned the world to its own sick self-cannibalism. One stayed, it's said, one man of the government, one man who _was _the government, who stayed behind to try and fix the world, but failed. There's no speculation how, but there was a corpse on London Bridge for a week that people didn't look at, didn't touch. Every night there's another fire, another lost child crying into the night, another gang war taking another ten-fifteen-twenty victims. There's no-one left to fix it, to stop it, now.

The phone networks are down, the internet is inaccessible, the world is silent but for the screaming. Planes no longer fly overhead, helicopters are nonexistent, and cars no longer run except for those belonging to the biggest and baddest of the petty criminals that have been set loose on the streets.

The televisions don't work anymore, either. No cable or satellite channels have got through for half a year, if you were getting the signal at all for the two months before that when the static started getting out of hand. But there was the BBC, that last bastion of an England full to the brim of tea and newspapers and dreams of an empire that isn't any more and wasn't even then, which lasted for four months longer before the news and dramas and talk shows stopped and it began to repeat – a month later it shut down entirely. There's still sound, sometimes, but nobody wants to listen. It's creepy, somehow, listening to _Doctor Who_ – that's the one that gets through most often, the fans can see the irony and the rest of them don't care – as the audio tracks leak and seep out onto the airwaves. It's wrong, listening to a saviour who isn't real and isn't coming.

The radio survives, loud and repetitive as the last few broadcasters holed up in their stations hopelessly, helplessly call out to their cities and their people with music and rambling and – when they finally, inevitably break – painful sobbing prayers. For a price, it's said in hushed conversations, you can get them to call out a name for you into the air. So many of these sad, forlorn hopes have been listed plainly, baldly, boredly on the wireless and yet people listen still for a name they know, for a call from someone out there. At least, those lucky few whose homes have electricity or who own radios and batteries do.

The cause of it all is hissed in corners, the whisper of a fragment of a rumour of a nightmare, a single, solitary, meaningless name – Moriarty.

They curse by it, now. That's the first step, they say, to godhood.

The last of the autumn leaves are falling when the new voice comes on the air. It's gentle, and warm, and laughs with fondness as it talks about the past and sells hope for the future. There's no name, and nobody can figure out where the signal comes from, but people listen and every district of the city calls back by calling between in soft, hushed conversation, neighbours talking to each other without a knife in their back pocket for the first time in so very long – they answer in their non-answer, in listening and passing on the message that he brings.

_We will survive._

The voice brings with it a wisp of remembered pride. This is London. The rest of the world can go to hell but this is _London_ and it has always been its own master, even before Greater London grew and it could still kick out a king with a lunatic grin of wood and stone and steel.

If you blow up a street it bleeds history, recalls the Blitz and spits it back in your face. If you stab a woman it screams of the Ripper and calls you an amateur for thinking that that could ever give you power over anything. If you set a fire of any size it laughs and laughs and scorches your soul, for not even the Great Fire could turn it to ash. There's nothing you can do to it that hasn't been done before and done worse.

And it has its own bizarre protectors.

Snow litters the ground, thin and dirty and splotchy as the sun rises behind grey clouds when one of them talks on the air, voice ringing out in place of the kindly one they've come to love.

"Good morning, London, rest of England. This is Sherlock Holmes. Prepare for the news, and don't worry, I'll speak slowly so you can try to keep up."

And the city – their world – holds its breath.


	2. Song on the Street

AN:/ For anyone who has read "Voices in the Wire" before, I'd like to point out that I made a couple of minor changes to the original one-shot. Please see end for further notes =)

Song on the Street

It would be foolish to say that the whole city heard the sharp-edged voice that rattled across the airwaves, but enough did - enough to send the message flying through the streets. Just as before, when the gentler voice had soothed them, the news was passed along from hand to hand and lip to ear, a furtive game of Chinese Whispers in an unfriendly dark.

Winter was settling in deep and cold as the days were being counted down to – what? There was no Christmas now, no Hannukah, no Saturnalia, no winter solstice festival. Nothing to celebrate, nothing to remind the people that things change and the light returns. But.

There was a feeling in the air.

Not quite the same as years before, true – there was far less joy and cheery bustle. What is the panic of a last-minute shopper when there aren't any presents to buy? And yet there was a hint of Christmas in the air.

A faint flavour of the fervent excitement and whispered half-prayers of children waiting for the magic of midnight to come; that was one part of it. The shaky jittery junkie feeling of anticipation, of a pounding heart pumping adrenaline through the veins just at the point when a fight is about to break out, that giddy rush of "I'll 'ave you mate" and "come on then 'ard man"; that was one part of it too. As was hope, the last of the evils in Pandora's Box – called foreboding in some stories, imprisoned in her jar of troubles – all quiet and fluttery, leaving an acrid choking tang on the tongue like a first cigarette, the first in such a very long while. The chemical cocktail of "Something Is Coming" draped itself over old London town; a cloying perfume dabbed on the neck of a city that giggled delirious in the night.

The news was this:

_Moriarty is human._

And this:

_They are coming for him._

And this:

_You are needed._

From man to woman to child and back, they prepared themselves for what was to come. Those who had chosen to be part of the discord overwhelming the pavements and roads could almost taste the insolence return to the city, the arrogance and sneering disdain merely an echo where once it was a shout but _there_ in a way it hadn't been for so, so long. Words were passed among them too; they'd heard the voice on the airwaves just the same and they knew the two were connected. What they didn't, couldn't understand was how one man could wake up the dragon in the city; all they could do was feel it stir in the stone and brick and tarmac and wait for it to rise.

Somewhere, out there in the city, out in the world, a man was laughing shrill and pleased, inviting the angels to try their luck against the devil himself.

(But there are no angels in London.)

AN:/ This chapter is the second installment of five planned, and it is unbeta'd. This isn't going to be a proper story, or at least it's not going to be a neat little story with plot and resolution - instead it is a kind of sequence of events leading to... something. Mostly this is because I'm a little nervous putting it up because I'm still not 100% sure that this style can actually carry a story and not a little whatever like the first oneshot, but I'm confident enough in what I have done to offer it up regardless. I would really appreciate any concrit that you send my way =)


	3. Riot in the Air

AN:/ Third installment. I think the next is coming on Saturday/Sunday, if anyone's interested in my not-really-planned schedule. Again, concrit more than welcome =) Thank you to the people who reviewed the last chapter, they really made me happy =)

**Important: **I think I went a little OTT, and I do know that some people are sensitive to things that come up in this chapter, so I'm going to put in a warning for **potentially distressing content** including passing references to non-con, racism, sexism, homophobia, abuse to children, old people and in general, and of course death, dying and violence. And no, it is not anywhere near as bad as it sounds; sentences only, no explicit details or scenarios. In fact, if you missed out the fifth paragraph, you'd miss most of it.

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Riot in the Air

When things came to a head, there was nothing so polite as an invitation to dance.

Perhaps once upon a later time someone would look back, but the most they would see would be the body of a boy sprawled mangled in the dirt and a woman – mother, sister, aunt, stranger, it didn't matter now – who swung a fist and felt it connect. The woman died, obviously, but the man who swung his fist for her didn't. After all, one woman is easy to shoot in the head. Fifty people who'd had enough weren't. Fifty neighbours, maybe more, maybe less, who lit a flame that London permitted to burn could not be stopped by something as small as a handgun. 'Community' might have been a dirty word in a time when friend was foe, but 'mob' was perfectly happy to take over in its place.

The spirit of riot and rebellion, of the chaos in the demon drink and of anger steeped in irritation and resentment, its brutish grin spread wide over a mouthful of broken glass, spilled out onto the streets like blood and caused red mist to rise and red liquid to flow. London had had quite enough of being oppressed _thank you very much_. Gods and men and monsters could come and try their conquering hand but each and every one had been ground into the dust and dirt beneath every native Londoner's feet.

And through the concrete and the tarmac and the brick, through the MDF and plastic and steel, oozed the ghosts – the memetic legacy of crime and thoughtlessness and petty revenge for slights imagined and real. Not the disembodied spirits of people who had lived them, committed them, suffered them, no. The ghosts of frustrations and agonies, of pain and sadness and indignation, and that eternal question: _why me?_

The pensioner mugged for the change in their pockets, all that was left of a pittance from the government. The mother who saw her child shot in the street. The business woman whose boss looked at her chest and not her face, and dismissed every word she said. The man in the alley, being beaten by yobs for falling in love with the wrong gender and the woman raped because _all she needed was a real man_. The child called names by their peers for having second-hand clothing, or a stutter, or bruises on their wrists, and the people they grew up into. The barista sick of people phoning their friends while ordering and the people in the queue behind that one person who never knew what they wanted when they got to the till. The person left alone, sixteen and impressionable, when their parents were off doing who knew what to survive in a shattered world and they met up with people who should have known better. The young man who was passed over for yet another job because they wanted to give it to someone a little bit less ethnic, who was eyed warily in the street and on the Underground in case he opened his jacket and yelled "God is great!" and who hated people just that little bit more for something they never even thought about. Every person who had ever been stuck behind someone who walked too slow, or drove too slow, even if there wasn't an appointment to miss.

All the big grievances and small irritations, leaked into the bones of the city from the past days of secure jobs and coffee shops and from the present where might was right and everyone too weak to keep something deserved to lose it, crawled up the throat of the city and let itself loose in an unearthly howl.

They had a war cry now.

Not that you could hear it over the sounds of smashing windows and the dull roar that accompanies any large gathering of people. Not that it could be heard over the sound of flesh smacking into flesh, over the occasional gunshot, any more than the faint _whumph_ of air from the lungs of someone stabbed not three seconds ago, or the rush of adrenaline-rich blood through veins. A silent war cry might be a peculiar paradox, but it rang loud in the ears of the Londoners.

_We've had enough. Piss off._

Of the seven million eight hundred thousand odd inhabitants left, only the children stayed at home. Perhaps in a kinder time the mothers would have stayed too, along with other sensible people who would watch the riots on the news and blame the government or the schools or the economy or the parents, tutting and sighing and glad of their walls. This was not a kinder time.

Everyone knew who had dedicated themselves to the cult of Moriarty, because everyone knows the face of the person who holds a knife to their mother's throat and tells them to hand over the cash (or something else, someone else, for them to play with). Hatred seething and roiling in the sewers of the heart had burned the image of everyone who had used the name to justify their sadistic pleasure or to take what belonged to someone else. After all – if you hurt a hundred people, all it means is that one day, when they've had enough of being the passive victimised person on the street with the moral high ground and the bruises to go with it, when the world decides to wrench itself into a brand new shape, you've a hundred people who know your name, a hundred who will gladly bleed for the chance to hurt you back.

And blood did run in the streets of London, and the Thames swallowed the bodies of the dead and dying. It was still a better hell than they'd had before.

As the river ran on, heedless of the violence and the sacrifice on either side like the most gruesome triumphal parade in history, time flowed by too – people ebbed and flowed back into their homes and hiding places as the red sun fell, leaving the wounded to fend for themselves and the dead to rot by the side of the road. Clean-up would come tomorrow, and tomorrow would come soon enough.

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AN:/ In case it wasn't clear, the riot is over. Reading through this again, I would like to point out that if I have offended anyone in any way with anything, it was entirely accidental, please just send a message and I will fix it, promise. If anyone thinks I should bump it up to M, because I am a little vague on the ratings system, please tell me and I will do so at the earliest opportunity.

The next installment will be placed, time-wise, near the end of the middle of this one, or at the beginning of the end.


	4. Fire on the Bridge

AN:/ Um - fourth installment? One left - probably going up Tuesday/Wednesday.

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Fire on the Bridge

No-one witnessed the trickster arrive, no-one saw the moment when the faint rumours that had caused the downfall of the city coalesced into a man whose suit was free from dust, whose hands were clean of the blood they'd caused to be spilt. No-one who would admit to it anyway, no-one whose presence could be proven.

Three men versus one, and to the never-present watchers tucked far out of sight it seemed almost pathetic. Surely an army was needed to bring down a demon – but the army had been summoned and deployed to deal with other matters equally as pressing. So small a force, and yet what men could attract the attention of a demon?

Three ordinary men versus a lunatic.

With both sides of the river swamped by the chaos that had been unleashed, this one still place in between should have been a sanctuary, the quiet voices providing a reassuring counterpoint to the screams and shouts from the banks.

The grey-haired officer of the law, the man like a knife tugged taut against the sky, the worn soldier with the gentle voice – pointless epithets for those who were left nameless but not wholly unremembered from the kinder days and given by people who shouldn't have been there, who should have run whilst they could – stood arrayed against the trickster, who was laughing, secure in his immortality. Who could wash this stain from London, who could erase his name from the country, who could scrub him from the world and its history? This was his eternity, and chaos would rain evermore, his gift to the unborn being that it would be his world they would inherit.

The non-observers thought it a matter of time before someone's throat was torn out with teeth.

But the soft voices and silent tension lasted for perhaps three minutes before one man walked away – the one like a knife. The rat of a man, the rumour personified, cried out in dismay and they heard the exchange.

_Where are you going? Is that it? And here I thought you were going to defeat me. Or can't you face the thought of me dying? The thought of me not being there to provide a challenge? I suppose you're just one more boring person then, aren't you, one more stupid ordinary person – and you just need to look around to see what I've done to a city full of those._

_I'd be delighted to, actually, but my colleagues and I spoke earlier. Drew lots, even. It'll be the law that does for you. I'm not interested in your look of surprise.  
><em>

The bark of a gun, and the rat-man crumpled. The three survivors – survivors of what? No blows were exchanged and yet the _relief_ – took the body and bundled it into the Thames. What more can be said? The riots raged on for a good while after, and nothing was made right again in the immediate wake of the execution.

The river rushed on, unaware of the concerns of the city, content to carry the filth on to the all-devouring sea.

A simple tale. A man stood on a bridge, three men arrayed against him. A shot rang out and down he fell, and that was that.

And yet –

And yet.

And _yet._

_.  
><em>

_.  
><em>

AN:/ For anyone interested, this was the third rewrite of the snippet that made me realise it would be possible to continue the original one-shot. The only bit that survived was the phrase "It'll be the law that does for you." It was also the most annoying - I kept sticking bits in then cutting them out again. Hopefully the best edit made the cut.


	5. Renewal of the City

AN:/ I lied. I wanted it done with.

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Renewal of the City

The death of the man did not cleanse the world – the death of a man cannot cleanse anything – but it scrubbed a tiny little blot off London and gave the chaos a staggering blow, just enough to give the good a little breather before really getting down to business. The rain that came in the spring couldn't purify the memories, either, or heal the bruises both visible and not, but it was a symbol in a time when symbols were all people had left to cling to in their ruined little world.

People started again, like the whole year had been spent asleep. It would take a very long time to recover, everyone knew that, but it was better than thinking about the nightmare that had been and gone. The government came back, in England at least, and it wasn't long before the static went away (whispers of the devices that brought it on didn't, though, not for a very long time) and there was news on BBC1 again. It was only six months before they had HD channels and cable, though it took a year and a half for them to stop showing repeats.

_Doctor Who_ went off the air until Royal Mail started up again and the internet came back online, at which point there was a flood of petitions demanding it back.

Apparently... well, a symbol for a shattered world. Does it really need saying?

The police force came back too, not the crippled thing that had fed from a dead man's hand before dissolving under the weight of its own corruption, but the boys and girls in blue, officers and representatives of the Law. It was a little embarrassing, really, when they went to the houses and asked if there had been any bother. Only embarrassment, though – nobody could spare the effort to resent people for doing what they would have done themselves. The small-time criminals who had kept their heads down and the big-time criminals who had had the sense to flee didn't return, didn't stick their heads out of their lairs for quite some time. The few who did were found dead or worse, and nobody sought justice for them.

And as for the three on the bridge (the three wise men as some wags started calling them) they just melted away into the jostling crowds of London. It wasn't all that surprising. People found it easier to forget the horror if they also forgot the heroes.

But as someone once said (and who, I've forgotten):

_Heroes don't exist – and even if they did, I wouldn't be one of them._

__AN:/ ... End. Completely. For real.


End file.
